Ethics through Literature: Ascetic and Aesthetic Reading in Western Culture by Brian Stock (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 371 Sanctifying the World is particularly good at overviewing Dawson's theological and ideological framework. At the heart of Dawson's Augustinian worldview, the book locates the sacramental union of the material and spiritual worlds. History cannot be understood without a sense of the platonic metaxy or middle ground that is humanity. For Dawson, religion and culture can never be separate. Culture arises from the cultus, which in turn arises out of a desire for the transcendent; therefore, no culture can be said to be truly secular. Indeed, the historian who only pays attention to the material and social elements of a culture is not telling the whole story. Dawson himself was best known for telling this story about medieval Christendom, advancing the thesis that the tension between a world-affirming and a world-denying faith gave a particular energy to European culture. However, Dawson insisted that "I am not bellocite, and my view of Western culture is quite different from 'Europe is the Faith" (152). Birzer traces Dawson's metahistorical account of the West up through the Reformation and the Catholic Baroque, the later a period which Dawson loved and which served him as a reminder that Christendom and the medieval are not synonymous. During and after the writing of the Gifford Lectures, Dawson became increasingly convinced that the key to cultural transformation would be found in education. Birzer is careful to connect Dawson's pedagogical program with the historian's Christian humanism. Dawson rejected not only the educational program of Dewey, but in turn the Great Books programs of Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins. He felt that such programs artificially abstracted important texts from their network of cultural contexts and debates. In their place, Dawson argued for a curriculum of Christian culture studies that included not only the theological and literary texts of the Christian West but also a study of the social, philosophical, and economic changes that accompanied them. Birzer is particularly useful here in lining out in some detail what the specifics of Dawson's program would have entailed had they been put into practice (235-39). Readers of Sanctifying the World will find a well-written and interesting introduction to the still too-often overlooked Catholic historian and cultural critic. Bitzer's study now serves as the beginning point for those interested in coming to terms with Christopher Dawson and his world. Philip Irving Mitchell Dallas Baptist University Ethics through Literature: Ascetic and Aesthetic Reading in Western Culture. By Brian Stock. Hanover and London: University Press of New England I Brandeis University Press I Historical Society ofIsrael, 2007. ISBN-13 978-1-58465-699-9, ISBN-10 1-58465-688-9. Pp. xviii+167. $45.00. Brian Stock's Ethics through Literature invites several readings because it is several books. Stock, who delivered material in this book as the Menahem Stern 372 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Jerusalem Lectures in 2005, refers to several writers who have asked readers to study their works at least twice, or who wrote with the expectation that their work would be mulled over either randomly or according to different strategies of reading. Stock mentions Montaigne's essays as one example of a book meant not to be read sequentially, but rather sampled. Stock later quotes Schopenhauer's expectation that readers of his magnum opus would read it at least twice to understand its main ideas well. In Stock's own case, his study of ethics in literature encompasses at least three different books. One looks at the history of reading itself, and the ascetic and aesthetic-meaning the ethical and sensual-purposes of reading. A second examines the interesting history of those scenes in literature where critical discoveries or actions take place while characters are in the process of reading, such as when Abelard seduces Heloise by reading with her. A third argument presented in the book concerns the ways in which ethical or ascetic readings framed aesthetic readings, and how in nineteenth-century literature, specifically in the critical works of Coleridge and Schopenhauer, the aesthetic serves, by contrast, as the ground of the ethical. In Schopenhauer's case, it is empathy and the capacity to feel for others...